Name: 【TED】Erika Gregory: The world doesn't need more nuclear weapons (The world doesn't need more nuclear weapons | Erika Gregory)
Uploaded: 2017-04-06T08:09:26.000Z
Duration: 15 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

How much weapons-grade nuclear material do you think it would take

to level a city the size of San Francisco?

How many of you think it would be an amount

Well actually, under the right circumstances,

an amount of highly enriched uranium about the size of your morning latte

Hundreds of thousands of others would become horribly ill,

and parts of the city would be uninhabitable for years,

because today's nuclear weapons are hundreds of times more powerful

even than those we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And even a limited nuclear war involving, say, tens of nuclear weapons,

could lead to the end of all life on the planet.

that right now we have over 15,000 nuclear weapons

And if you live in a city or near a military facility,

In fact, if you live in any of the rural areas

where nuclear weapons are stored globally,

About 1,800 of these weapons are on high alert,

which means they can be launched within 15 minutes

and maybe you have that -- what was it? -- psychic fatigue

that we heard about a little bit earlier.

So I'm going to switch gears for just a second,

and I'm going to talk about my imaginary friend,

is part of a generation that is more politically and socially engaged

as change agents and leaders and activists.

They regularly protest about the issues they care about,

but nuclear weapons are not one of them, which makes sense,

because Jasmine was born in 1991, at the end of the Cold War.

So she didn't grow up hearing a lot about nuclear weapons.

She never had to duck and cover under her desk at school.

For Jasmine, a fallout shelter is an app in the Android store.

because right now, we need Generation Possible

to help us make some really important decisions about nuclear weapons.

For instance, will we further reduce our nuclear arsenals globally,

to modernize them so they last throughout the 21st century,

so that by the time Jasmine is my age, she's talking to her children

And if you're paying any attention at all to cyberthreats,

or, for instance, if you've read about the Stuxnet virus

or, for God's sake, if you've ever had an email account or a Yahoo account

you can imagine the whole new world of hurt that could be triggered

by modernization in a period of cyberwarfare.

Now, if you're paying attention to the money,

to feeding and educating and employing people,

all of which could reduce the threat of nuclear war to begin with.

because nuclear weapons -- they're vulnerable.

that terrorists are trying to get ahold of them.

when four retirees and two taxi drivers were arrested

for trying to sell nuclear materials for 200 million dollars,

they demonstrated that the black market for this stuff is alive and well.

because there have been dozens of accidents

and I bet most of us have never heard anything about them.

we've dropped nuclear weapons on the Carolinas twice.

because the nuclear core was stored somewhere else on the plane.

In another case, the weapon did arm when it hit the ground,

and five of the switches designed to keep it from detonating failed.

But if that's not enough to get your attention,

That's when Russian radar technicians saw

what they thought was a US nuclear missile

It later turned out to be a Norwegian rocket

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Erika Gregory: The world doesn't need more nuclear weapons (The world doesn't need more nuclear weapons | Erika Gregory)

incredible

fatigue

engage

applause